“I want you to have a bias for action,” one of my basic school instructors told our class of boot lieutenants. “When there’s not enough information to make a great decision, I want you to make a good one. When there’s not enough for a good one, I want you to make any decision. Indecision kills.”

Marine training was life altering. I learned to go full speed or expect to die. I became accustomed to having my flaws and strengths visible to everyone. I learned how to associate a purpose and intent with everything I did, and explain it in as few words and pictures as possible. In short, I became a thick-skinned, order-interpreting, order-executing, and order-giving machine. I was incapable of sitting still if there was something to do.

After getting to the fleet, it didn’t take me long to start putting what I’d been taught to practice. But really, it was the four years of cultural transformation that had turned me from an easy-going, non-confrontational kid into a quick reacting, millisecond-managing, booming voice authoritarian. I wasn’t the same person anymore, and I’m sure I never will be again.


Every leader has his or her own style. The style I developed was to bulldoze. I’d try to win my troops’ confidence by showing a high level of expectation, capability, and strength early on. Whether or not they were impressed was irrelevant- soon I’d begin imposing my standards of excellence on them and demanding they perform at usually one pay grade above their actual ranks- I also made it a point to empower them so they had the authority to go with the higher standards. Then I would methodically begin piling more and more work onto our unit until I thought we had reached capacity, and then add a little more.

My style developed this way in large part because the Marine Corps taught me to never be satisfied. The Marine ethos stated that I would keep improving my fighting hole until I received the order to fill it in; to keep training until I was hitting center mass with every round even if I could make high scores without doing so. I lived this philosophy in every aspect of my life- from my bulldozer leadership style, to the gym, to the way I wore my uniform.


The things I was taught to do would make most civilians, and some members of the sister services, cringe. I’m not talking about the usual party tricks: drill instructors screaming, sleep deprivation, the cold, the lack of food and sanitation, or even sleeping through mortar attacks. I’m talking about becoming the opportunistic killer I was willingly molded into.

When I talked to my battalion intelligence chief before my first convoy in Iraq, after he had told me where the recent IED action was, only one question came to my mind: Who can I kill? Fallujah was an asymmetric battle: the bad guys knew who I was and where to find me but the opposite wasn’t true. I was sick of the mortars and rockets, sick of being on the sidelines. Could I kill anyone with a weapon, out of uniform? How about cell phones? How about men digging holes on the side of the road?

What you learn in the Marine Corps is that you are only as successful as the number of opportunities you exploit, and therefore the number of opportunities you can identify. Likewise, you are only as safe as the problems you can solve, and therefore the ones you can uncover. As with everything, there’s a certain amount of luck involved in warfare, but the minute you put success or failure into fate’s hands you cease to be a leader. I had no intention of leaving a guy burying a bomb in the dirt alive for the next convoy to pass behind me.


About a year after I had got out of the Marine Corps and was living back in New York, my friend found the three-inch Spyderco knife I kept under my belt. “What is this?” she asked, concerned, but amused. Embarrassed, I put it in my pocket and told her to forget about it- “old habits,” I excused myself. But to me it made perfect sense. I wasn’t taught to fire warning shots. If some thug pulled a weapon on me, he intended to kill me. I would kill him first. This was a problem I could solve. End of story.


For the last three years, I’ve been telling myself that one day I’ll be able to learn the collective leadership model practiced by so many civilian partnerships like the one I’m trying to start with some of my grad school peers. That I'd be able to resist the urge to take charge of every leadership vacuum I came across and that I’d learn how to build consensus diplomatically, keeping my opinion to myself. That I'd even learn how to let an opportunity pass by.

One day, maybe, but not yet.